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When the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts opened its doors, in 1971, the Times’ architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, was not impressed. She described the building’s style as “aggrandized posh” and sniffed that its overlong corridors “would be great for drag racing.” The 2,360-seat Opera House, she wrote, looks like “one of those passe, redpadded drugstore candy‐valentines,” and, on Sunday night, at the forty-eighth Kennedy Center Honors, that’s exactly what it was—a tacky, supersized love letter to the center’s self-installed chairman, President Donald Trump.

Every detail of the ceremony appeared to have been plucked from Trump’s mood board, an indelible blend of revanchist impulses and eighties camp. The Honors medallions, which historically were trimmed in rainbow ribbon and had been made, for forty-seven years, by the Baturin family, in Bethesda, Maryland, were redesigned, by Tiffany & Co., with a navy-blue ribbon purportedly associated with “tradition.” This year’s awardees were the country singer George Strait, the glam-rock band Kiss, the Broadway tenor Michael Crawford—known for his defining role as the Phantom of the Opera—the disco queen Gloria Gaynor, and Sylvester Stallone, of “Rocky” and “Rambo” fame. “We’ve had no group like it,” Trump said, an accurate statement. No previous cohort of Honors talent has so perfectly reflected a single person’s taste.

Also a seeming tribute to Trump: steakhouse salads served in glass cups outside the auditorium; Mar-a-Lago-faced women done up as if “Thank you for your attention to this matter!” were a dress code. (“This matter” being boobs.) Selfie stations were arranged around the Grand Foyer, the backdrops resplendent with crushed roses, cinematic skylines, and guitars. Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, milled about with political figures such as Marco Rubio, Howard Lutnick, Kari Lake, and Sean Duffy. Kellyanne Conway, posed for a photo, draped in emerald gauze. No fewer than nine of the red-carpet-walkers were associated with Paramount Skydance, which recently had a large deal go through Trump’s F.C.C. and is now angling to buy Warner Brothers. (Later this month, the Honors show will be broadcast on CBS, a Paramount-owned network.) “D.C. isn’t as bad as they say it is,” a guest in a wine-red jacket advised his companions.

Compared with the FIFA World Cup draw, which had taken place at the center a few days earlier—a genuinely star-studded affair, during which Trump was awarded a cursed-looking object representing the sports body’s inaugural Peace Prize—the Honors seemed like an afterthought, with what scanned as a preponderance of fresh-faced young politicos talking shop. Fashion-wise, a polished banality and a sensitivity to traditional gender roles prevailed: mermaid waves and clean shaves, furs and flag pins. As we filed into the Opera House, the crystal chandelier, a gift from Austria, twinkled above us. If it crashed to the ground, as in the first act of “The Phantom of the Opera,” would Crawford be suspected? Or D.E.I.?

Perhaps the most radical change to the ceremony this year was that the chairman would be m.c.’ing the proceedings himself. It is a job that plays to Trump’s strengths as an entertainer: charisma, mischief, unpredictability. Entering the building, he teased that “maybe I haven’t prepared” and that “maybe you want to be a little loose.” Soon after he took the stage, he promised to “try to act like Johnny Carson.”

Trump’s in-person-hosting duties were limited to three sets of brief remarks. He largely avoided politics, save for a few asides: “They tried to get Biden to do this”—helm the Honors—he said, adding, “I would have watched!” He revelled in dusting off his real-estate-impresario persona. Earlier in the evening, Trump said, he’d toured the Kennedy Center grounds—he has secured two hundred and fifty-seven million dollars from Congress for physical repairs—and he’d marvelled at the “gorgeous” SyberJet Lounge, previously the Opera House Circles Lounge, which got its new name when the aircraft manufacturer sponsored the red carpet for a Stuttgart Ballet performance at the center, in October. (This was a consolation prize of sorts, after the Alvin Ailey dance company declined to make its annual appearance at the Center.) “The Trump Kennedy Center—” Trump began, and paused. The crowd cheered. “Oops,” he said impishly.

It’s been a year of embarrassment and chaos for the Kennedy Center, a sprawling organization that also houses the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera. The cultural hub has served as one of the higher-profile demolition projects of Trump’s second term, ever since Trump posted, on a Friday evening in early February, that he planned to fire the board’s then chairman, David Rubenstein, and other trustees who did not “share our vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” By the following Wednesday, Deborah Rutter, who had served as the president of the Kennedy Center for more than a decade, had been dismissed, along with the organization’s general counsel and all of the Biden appointees on the traditionally nonpartisan board. They were replaced with allies of the President’s, including the singer Lee Greenwood; the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles; the Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham; and Trump’s longtime adviser Dan Scavino. And Trump installed Richard Grenell, a former ambassador to Germany, who briefly served as the head of intelligence during Trump’s first term, as the center’s interim president. “Ric, welcome to show business!” he posted on Truth Social.

Trump’s ostensible reasons for seizing the reins were that the Kennedy Center’s programming had taken a “very wokey” turn, with “Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth,” and that this D.E.I. capitulation had blown a hole in the organization’s finances. “The Kennedy Center learned the hard way that if you go woke, you will go broke,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said at the time. (As The New Yorker reported in April, the center’s revenue had in fact grown steadily under Rutter’s leadership, and its endowment increased by more than fifty per cent.) Grenell’s arrival marked a swing toward the reactionary, and the advent of leadership that’s more fluent in the culture wars than in culture. Listing pronouns in e-mail signatures has been expressly prohibited. In September, the center hosted a prayer vigil for the slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Some Kennedy Center old-timers have dubbed Grenell and his lieutenants, Nick Meade, Rick Loughery, and Nick Canny, “the Icks.” (Grenell is also known as Grendel.)

Employees told me that the new hires “don’t understand the basic vocabulary” of arts administration. They have questions. Things like, what is “capacity”? What is “an arena show”? What is a “backline”? What is “stage left”? What is an “usher”? Perhaps predictably, Trump’s takeover and firing of veteran cultural programmers made the center radioactive to performers. The comedian Issa Rae and the musical “Hamilton” pulled out of their contracts soon after Trump appointed himself chair. Other artists quietly ghosted the arts hub; at least one agreed to perform, but asked not to be named in social media posts.

The center has weathered months of damaging press—reports of plummeting ticket sales, skittish donors, and aggrieved artists waiting for payment. Even as the organization’s reputation has tanked, Grenell has found people to write big checks. For this year’s Honors, he dramatically raised prices for the choicest seats. In a phone call, Grenell said he also supports “niche programming which is not always able to sell tickets,” so long as it can find a deep-pocketed benefactor. (He asked the Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s foundation to underwrite the center’s production of “Parade,” citing the production’s “uplifting” beauty and warnings against antisemitism.) Yet the center’s president is known to be an unreliable chronicler of its fortunes. For example, Grenell flaunted that “The Sound of Music” sold out on its opening night. According to internal sales figures reviewed by The New Yorker, however, it was at fifty-four-per-cent capacity. In general, one staffer told me, “I’d have better results selling shows in the pandemic with half the people dying.”

Under Grenell’s leadership, the Kennedy Center has appeared to transform into a seat of political and interpersonal backscratching. The new president appointed Elliot Berke, his longtime lawyer, as the organization’s general counsel, and Lisa Dale, a former campaign adviser to Kari Lake (Lake’s husband, Jeff Halperin, has also worked for the center, making social media videos), to lead the sixteen-person department, formerly a team of nearly a hundred. The new fund-raising approach is more typical of political campaigns, multiple employees told me—a series of one-and-done, steroidal cash shots, often with the expectation of access in return. Grenell “cares about countries and corporations,” one staffer said. “He doesn’t care about people.”

When Trump appointed Grenell the acting intelligence director during Trump’s first term, Grenell drew criticism for not registering as having advocated on behalf of a foreign power after his public-relations firm, Capitol Media Partners, worked for a foundation funded by autocratic Hungary. (A lawyer for Grenell at the time said he was not required to register.) In October, the Kennedy Center partnered with the Hungarian Embassy on a concert, featuring the violinist Zoltán Mága, that doubled as, in Mága’s words, a celebration “of Hungarian freedom, Christian values, and national pride.” According to an archived version of Grenell’s personal website, his P.R. firm also had clients based in Kazakhstan; Kennedy Center spokesperson, Roma Daravi, revealed last month that the Kazakh government has pledged a donation to the center.

At the end of November, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, announced that the Environment and Public Works Committee would be opening an investigation into Grenell’s leadership. “The Center is being looted to the tune of millions of dollars in foregone revenue, canceled programming, unpaid use of its facilities, and wasteful spending on luxury restaurants and hotels,” Whitehouse wrote. A press release for the investigation called the Kennedy Center “a slush fund and private club for Trump’s friends and political allies.” Grenell disputes these allegations, though it’s undeniable that the center has become overtly MAGA-aligned since he took over. In the past few months, the center has hosted a NewsNation “bipartisan town hall” featuring Chris Cuomo and Tom Homan and a Christian Persecution Summit organized by CPAC, which, according to Whitehouse, paid a sharply reduced rental fee. Documents obtained by Whitehouse suggest that FIFA used the center’s buildings for free, but a spokesperson for Grenell said that the soccer organization donated over two million dollars, in addition to providing five million in “sponsorship opportunities.”

The irony of all of this is that Trump was drawn to the Kennedy Center by its cultural prestige—a resource that his loyalists’ cronyism and self-dealing have grievously depleted. The center has historically relied on “underplays,” in which artists accept much lower rates than they otherwise would in order to perform at a culturally significant venue. Now that the space’s reputation is tarnished, performing talent has less incentive to settle for those smaller fees. And, for all of the Administration’s insistence that being woke made the Kennedy Center broke, there’s little indication that the traditionalist counterprogramming is bringing in ticket sales. A Noël concert that Grenell ardently touted as early as February—“we are doing a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas,” he said—is scheduled for December 17th. As of December 8th, it had sold just over three hundred tickets, out of around twenty-three hundred.

At this point, we know what Trump wants to do with the Kennedy Center. As a real-estate developer, he wants to renovate it; as a politician, he wants to assimilate it into his movement. But Trump’s investment in the organization feels deeply personal. Each honoree seemed to represent a different aspect of the President’s idealized self. There was Kiss—a group of rebellious rockers from Queens. Strait, who evokes a romantic notion of the sturdy, unpretentious everyman, a guy who knows how to lasso a bull. As for Gaynor, the President spoke fervently about the inspiration to be found in the “three simple words” of her signature song: “I will survive.” And Stallone, Trump said, his voice heavy with feeling, was “the greatest underdog in cinema.”

Most illuminating of all might be Crawford, whom Kelsey Grammer couldn’t even introduce without breaking into a self-deprecating ditty. (“Hello, Michael,” he sang, to the tune of “Hello, Dolly,” his voice tremulous with incomplete commitment to the bit.) The soprano Laura Osnes, who was ostracized by the Broadway community after the New York Post publicized the fact that she hadn’t been vaccinated for COVID, played Christine, the heroine of “Phantom of the Opera.” Osnes teamed up with David Phelps, a Christian recording artist, for the show’s titular anthem. As the number reached its climax, the Phantom delivered his booming command to “sing, my angel of music!” Christine, the glittering captive, strained her voice higher and higher.

For all his Broadway aspirations, Trump, when he took the stage as the host, didn’t sound like someone whose dream was coming true. His manner was perfunctory, a bit bitter. “Many of you are miserable, horrible people,” Trump told the audience, to laughter. Some of the night’s biggest acts, he said later, “probably don’t like me very much.” Technical snafus occasionally disturbed the proceedings. A couple of times, the house lights came up before a video was over; at one point, in the middle of a speech, crew members started transporting a piano. ♦

The film-industry panic sparked by the news of Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. has been immediate and intense, and in the days immediately after, it was hard to find anyone not named David Zaslav (the head of the studio’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery) who was happy about the prospect. The C.E.O. of the movie-theatre trade group Cinema United called the deal “an unprecedented threat” and the Writers Guild said, “This merger must be blocked.” And the ranks of its opponents included not just antitrust guards, such as Elizabeth Warren, but also one of the industry’s biggest and newest tycoons, David Ellison, whose company, Skydance Media, acquired Paramount (and, with it, CBS) earlier this year, to become Paramount Skydance. He’d been trying to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, in its entirety, for months and has launched a hostile-takeover bid.

The proposed merger is only the latest of many takeovers, ranging from propitious to preposterous, that have marked the film business for more than half a century, with movie studios traded from hand to hand like baseball cards. The studio now called Sony was originally Columbia Pictures, founded in 1924, which Coca-Cola bought in 1982 and sold, seven years later, to the Japanese electronics titan. M-G-M was purchased by the financier Kirk Kerkorian in 1969, and in the nineteen-eighties he passed it, or parts of it, back and forth with the media mogul Ted Turner like a hot potato, until it landed with Sony, in 2005. Today, it’s owned by a subsidiary of Amazon. As for Warner Bros., it merged in 1990 with Time Inc., and, in 2001, the new entity was at the center of a deal that has been called “the worst in history”: AOL’s merger with Time Warner. In 2014, Rupert Murdoch failed in a bid for Time Warner; then A. T. & T. acquired it, in 2018, and the media company has been in its present form since only 2022, when Warner Media, formerly owned by A. T. & T., merged with Discovery, Inc.

It’s not hard to see why Netflix would want to buy Warner Bros.: it needs movies to put on its streaming service, and the studio is a great producer of movies. (This year’s roster includes “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another,” and it has also produced what may be the artistically best of all blockbuster I.P. movies, “Barbie.”) What’s in it for Warner Bros. Discovery is also clear: cash. (That previous merger involved a lot of debt financing.) For everyone else, the worry is twofold—whether, under Netflix, Warner Bros. will be able to continue producing ambitious movies and whether its films will still be screened in theatres or will instead go straight to streaming. Warner Bros. makes much of its money by putting its movies into theatres, whereas Netflix does so far more rarely, usually for brief limited runs to fulfill agreements with filmmakers or to be eligible for Oscars. In Hollywood, concern about whether Warner Bros. will remain a theatre-centered business is haunted by historical echoes of earlier seismic shifts in the movie business. It seems existential, perhaps portending the end of mainstream moviegoing.

At a commercial level, it would seem odd for Netflix to spurn theatrical releases entirely: “Barbie” has taken in nearly one and a half billion dollars in ticket sales, and, this year, Warner Bros. has three of the top six films at the domestic box office, seven of the top sixteen. Indeed, on Monday, Ted Sarandos, the C.E.O. of Netflix, stated that he intends to keep Warner Bros. in its current form, as “a motion picture studio with a theatrical distribution machine.” Still, Netflix is a four-hundred-billion-dollar company that’s synonymous with streaming, and every viewer who heads to a movie theatre takes a bite out of that core business. Sarandos has spoken of theatrical moviegoing as a practice that’s dwindling in favor of streaming, likely destined to become a niche activity: “I believe it is an outmoded idea, for most people—not for everybody.”

Unfortunately, I think he’s right—for the most part. The kinds of movies that still do well at the box office are big spectacles, big either in scope or in affect (i.e., shock and gore). It’s human-scale movies—realistic dramas and comedies—that have suffered most. They tend to be made on lower budgets now, and have become, essentially, art-house releases, showing up far more often on critics’ lists and at the Oscars than high on box-office charts. I’m thinking, for instance, of Mary Bronstein’s film “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”: it seems set to feature widely during awards season—the lead actress, Rose Byrne, has already won awards from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and other such groups, plus a Golden Globe nomination—but the movie has taken in barely over a million dollars in theatrical release.

Still, the obvious threat that streaming poses to movie theatres obscures something important: what Warner Bros. and Netflix have in common is as noteworthy as what distinguishes them. Only Warner Bros. has a robust business in theatrical distribution, but both companies produce movies and release them via streaming. (Warner Bros. is twinned with HBO Max, which is also a part of Netflix’s proposed acquisition.) This means that the two companies have something that was a crucial feature of classic-era Hollywood studios: the ability to release their own films. The major studios owned movie theatres and were thus assured of releases, regardless of their films’ quality. In many markets, they were also able to shut out films (perhaps better ones) from other producers. These practices were challenged in a host of antitrust suits brought by the federal government and supported by the studios’ competitors—a group of independent producers that included Orson Welles, Walt Disney, and Samuel Goldwyn. Eventually, in 1948, the Supreme Court handed down a groundbreaking antitrust decision, in the so-called Paramount Case, which compelled studios to divest themselves of their theatres, giving independent productions freer access to distribution.

The decree came at the worst possible time for the studios. In the immediate postwar years, television developed rapidly as a medium across the United States. Between 1948 and 1955, TV ownership in American households went from one per cent to seventy-five per cent. Moviegoing dropped precipitously in the same period, by about fifty per cent. Just when studios lost their most reliable source of income—their films’ guaranteed distribution—their movies lost popularity. Studios tried enticing viewers back with spectacular innovations, such as 3-D, wide-screen films, and stereo sound, with only intermittent success. Nonetheless, the nineteen-fifties proved to be a high-water mark for Hollywood artistry, precisely because the grip of studios was weakened. Veteran directors, such as John Ford (“Wagon Master,” “The Quiet Man”) and Allan Dwan (“Silver Lode,” “The River’s Edge”), had more leeway, encountering less interference from studio bosses. And a new generation of directors, including Nicholas Ray (“In a Lonely Place,” “Johnny Guitar”) and Ida Lupino (“Outrage,” “The Bigamist”), were able to work more freely from early in their careers.

The business outlook remained bleak, of course. Throughout the nineteen-sixties, amid vast social and generational changes, the studios, many still under their longtime executives, struggled to keep pace, and Hollywood continued to face declining attendance, from thirty million in average weekly attendance in 1960 to eighteen million in 1970. A wave of takeovers began, attracting purchasers with no previous connection to the media. The auto-parts manufacturer Gulf & Western bought Paramount, and Warner Bros. was acquired by Kinney National, best known as a parking-lot chain. Again, the outcome was surprisingly positive, and the seventies are now seen as another Hollywood golden age. The industry, turning in desperation to a fresh cohort of directors, revitalized itself both artistically (as with Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich, Elaine May and Clint Eastwood, Francis Ford Coppola and Terrence Malick) and commercially (as with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas). These directors, having grown up amid the cultural shifts that had left the studios out of touch, made movies that connected with a new generation of viewers. Suddenly, movies became, as they’d been at the start, an art of youth, and the art advanced.

The movie business faced a similar crisis, early in the twenty-first century, when confronted with the popularity of so-called prestige TV, such as HBO’s “The Sopranos.” Movie viewership declined, most notably for mid-budget dramas—which is to say, the productions closest in kind to cable’s acclaimed programming. Many veteran filmmakers found themselves stranded, and again there was much hand-wringing among critics and directors. Yet independent producers came to the rescue. They saved some of the most illustrious of careers, including those of Scorsese—whose frustration with the studios had brought him to the point where, he told me, “I realized there was no way I could continue making films”—and Wes Anderson, who was freed up to ever-wilder inspirations. The crisis also inspired yet another new generation of filmmakers, working entirely outside the industry on ultra-low budgets, whose utterly uninhibited work marked another revitalization of the art form. They include Greta Gerwig, the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, the couple Ronald and Mary Bronstein, and the group of actors—such as Adam Driver—who joined in.

And who were among the independent producers writing the checks? Streaming companies. Spike Lee, in the twenty-tens, had resorted to making self-financed and crowdfunded movies and had no independent producer, but then Amazon inaugurated its slate of film productions with “Chi-Raq” (2015). This set Lee on a path that he has been blazing ever since with other streaming companies: “Da 5 Bloods” was made with Netflix, and his latest, “Highest 2 Lowest,” with Apple. As for Scorsese, only Netflix was willing to pick up the colossal tab—reportedly as high as two hundred and twenty-five million dollars—to produce the technologically complex and large-scale gangster film “The Irishman,” one of his greatest works. And it was Apple that provided most of the approximately two hundred million dollars to produce “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Wes Anderson’s four short Roald Dahl adaptations from 2023, some of his most boldly and concentratedly innovative films, were produced by Netflix, which also produced two of Richard Linklater’s best recent films, “Nouvelle Vague” and “Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood.” Meanwhile, Amazon was behind one of this year’s best and most unusual movies, Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda.” The point is, simply, that crises yield solutions from players who are standing outside the crosswinds—whether streaming services or smaller production companies that don’t face the same financial pressures as major studios, independent filmmakers, and the micro-institutions that foster them.

Of course, the traditional studios’ power to produce and release great films remains strong, as with this year’s slate of Warner Bros. productions and Jordan Peele’s three masterworks, “Get Out,” “Us,” and “Nope,” all from Universal. And streaming services are no panacea, not least because films such as “Hedda” remain rare exceptions. The services are businesses, no less than studios and theatres are—and, because their business model doesn’t depend on paying customers for individual films, illustrious movies serve as advertisements, a way of displaying respectful benevolence toward the art of movies, even as streamers cut into the fundamental revenue source for theatrical releases. The challenge posed by streaming services to distribution companies and movie theatres gives rise to a thought experiment. Suppose Netflix had already owned Warner Bros. when the studio produced “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another,” and given them only brief and limited theatrical runs rather than wide releases: would these films’ eventual place in the history of cinema be diminished?

The movie named best of all time in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, Chantal Akerman’s film “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975), wasn’t released here until 1983, at New York’s Film Forum, and the reported domestic box-office figure for the year was $19,858. Doubtless, despite its many repertory screenings since then, exponentially many more viewers have watched it at home, whether on physical media or through streaming, than in theatres.

The experiential difference between watching a movie in a theatre and on a screen at home varies for every movie, and in no predictable way. Having done most of my primordial childhood movie-viewing on TV and most of my artistically formative viewing, in adolescence and early adulthood, in theatres, I’m agnostic. I love the scale, the concentration, and the uninterrupted time of the movie theatre—the submission to directorial command—but I also love the intimacy of home viewing, the one-on-one communion, the power of obsession and in-depth exploration of a movie as an image-book. Fundamentally, I’m grateful to see movies that expand the art of cinema wherever they’re available. There are great movies that wouldn’t exist were they not considered commercial propositions for theatrical release, others that wouldn’t exist if they weren’t of value for streaming services; and still others that, released in very few theatres, owe their endurance to home video.

The art of movies doesn’t advance in lockstep with Hollywood’s commercial success, and crises in the business don’t necessarily harm the art—but there are matters that transcend the art of movies. Trouble with the business harms livelihoods. Among the most serious concerns regarding the Netflix deal is that a single gigantic buyer of proposed film and TV projects would have something close to a monopsony, which would surely mean less employment for film workers at all levels and far less competition for scripts and intellectual property: “The outcome,” the Writers Guild anticipates, “would eliminate jobs, push down wages, worsen conditions for all entertainment workers.”

The same will be true if Paramount Skydance prevails, but more so because the new conglomerate will be even larger. If David Ellison succeeds in buying Warner Bros. Discovery, he will own not only the parts that Netflix wants (the Warner Bros. studio and HBO Max) but also CNN, Discovery, Turner Classic Movies, and a host of other businesses. Ellison has already said that he’d consolidate CNN with CBS News (which Paramount Skydance has placed under the management of the conservative journalist Bari Weiss) and the fact that the takeover bid has been mounted with an assist from Jared Kushner (and a lot of money from Gulf-state sovereign wealth funds) is a further sign about the fate likely awaiting independent cable news in the Trump era. One of the key aspects of the new cinema of spectacle is its self-aware confrontation with political power and its injustices; it’s hard to imagine Warner Bros., under the aegis of Paramount Skydance and Kushner, producing movies such as “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another.” Moreover, Paramount Skydance’s track record as a film-production company lacks the kind of highlights, like “Nouvelle Vague” and “The Irishman,” that enhance the reputation of Netflix. It has made few if any movies that indicate it will have an artistically enlightened approach to its stewardship of Warner Bros.

So, once again, the future of the art seems to be at stake—and not only its future but also its past, given the enormous and vital back catalogue of Warner Bros. movies. The responsibility that would come along with the acquisition is suggested by another such deal. When Disney bought 21st Century Fox, in 2019, it acquired Twentieth Century Fox’s catalogue of movies—and, reportedly, began restricting access to repertory screenings of that company’s classic titles. Netflix’s plans regarding the major swath of film history of which it may become the custodian have yet to be announced. The modern cinema is a historicist cinema, rooted in critical awareness of the illustrious predecessors that furnish forms—and, even more, attitudes—toward the art. The control of history, in movies as in politics, is a crucial form of power over generations to come. That’s why the sheer fact of consolidation, and the resulting dependence on the benevolence of a few executives, is a looming menace. The future transcends the fate of any group of companies; the past remains concentrated in their hands. ♦

This past August, clips of the millennial comedian and podcaster Adam Friedland speaking about the war in Gaza collected millions of views online, becoming some of the year’s most influential bits of commentary. In the footage, Friedland is slouched in a leather chair on a wood-panelled stage set, wearing a blue suit jacket with jeans, his curly hair foppishly askew. The vibe is casual, but his words have a sober urgency. “They’re demeaned and dehumanized and surveilled constantly,” he says of Palestinians. Tearing up, growing more impassioned, Friedland argues that the war in Gaza amounted to a genocide, perpetrated by a people who should know better. “The fact that I still fucking care about being Jewish is embarrassing,” he adds at one point. His interlocutor, the New York congressman Ritchie Torres, a pro-Israel Democrat, appears cold and unmoved, which only makes Friedland’s emotions seem more pronounced. These fragments of media came from “The Adam Friedland Show,” a podcast launched in 2022 that has turned into a high-production-value video series distributed on YouTube and many other platforms. Friedland first became well-known online nearly a decade ago, as a host of the raunchy, leftist politics-adjacent podcast “Cum Town,” but the recent success of his video podcast has turned him into something else: an onscreen talent, a recognizable face, a televisual celebrity of the digital sphere.

In the course of 2025, the video-podcast clip in general became a major unit of discourse. Once upon a time, aspiring public intellectuals and digital-native commentators had blogs. Then they had Twitter accounts, snarking from behind cartoon avatars; then podcasts, speaking into microphones into the void; then newsletters, publishing reams of text into our inboxes. In all of those formats, the human body was conspicuously absent—but no longer. With the rise of the somewhat oxymoronic video podcast, the de-rigueur medium is a digital talk show of one, an eponymous production performed—face, body, outfit, and soul—for the camera. We don’t just listen to Friedland, Ezra Klein, “Call Her Daddy” ’s Alex Cooper, “Talk Easy” ’s Sam Fragoso, “Throwing Fits” ’s James Harris and Lawrence Schlossman, or myriad other podcast proprietors anymore; we watch, often in closeup, every expression that flits across their faces, and thus cultivate a kind of parasocial intimacy usually reserved for Hollywood actors. There is no more hiding behind a byline; the moment mandates hair stylists and makeup. And, with the end of faceless punditry, measured neutrality moves toward obsolescence, too. The quality that hosts need in order to court and maintain audiences online is a dose of charismatic feeling, preferably caught in thirty seconds or less.

A few early adopters have been broadcasting their podcasts on video for many years. Joe Rogan has been filming his podcast since it launched in 2009, and the tech tastemaker Lex Fridman started filming his conversations back in 2018. But the mass rush toward video podcasting began with the 2024 Presidential race, which made clear just how much influence on public opinion shows like Rogan’s exerted. Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Elon Musk all took their turns doing three-hour gab sessions with Rogan in the run-up to Election Day; that August, Trump went viral discussing addiction in an unusually touchy-feely moment on Theo Von’s video podcast. MAGA’s success reaching voters this way—and Kamala Harris’s regrettable decision not to go on Rogan—sparked a realization that the medium was more than passive man-cave listening. Early this year, YouTube revealed that a billion monthly users consumed podcasts on its platform and declared itself “the most frequently used service for listening to podcasts in the U.S.”

During Trump’s first year back in office, D.I.Y. footage of two people talking into microphones has shaped the news cycle as much as any cable network. In January, the Times columnist Ross Douthat patched Steve Bannon in over Zoom for a conversation first aired on an episode of the Times’ “Matter of Opinion” podcast and then syndicated on Douthat’s new video podcast, “Interesting Times.” In a surreal mise en scène, Douthat, appearing in high res in a cozy studio, watched Bannon’s face on a laptop as he denounced “Broligarchs” such as Musk, whose DOGE operations were ramping up at the time, signalling the first clear schism between the MAGA right and the tech overlords who backed Trump in 2024. (Watching someone watch a Zoom call is a video-podcast innovation of dubious appeal.) Then, in February, Musk made a redux appearance on Rogan’s show and delivered one of his most in-depth public discussions of DOGE; on YouTube, the episode racked up more than fourteen million views. The video podcast was suddenly a news-making venue, a makeshift press conference at a time when, thanks in part to Trump’s draconian approach to the First Amendment, press was more limited than ever.

What’s motivating the turn to video goes beyond the strategic utility of cultivating intimacy with an audience; the trend has equally to do with the structural mechanics of disseminating content online. Even as podcasts exploded in popularity during the early twenty-tens, the form had problems with discovery and distribution. Isolated bits of audio were not likely to go viral, because there was no centralized social-media-style feed for audio content, and because the major podcasting apps did not use algorithmic recommendations to help creators find fresh audiences. If you are an audio podcaster looking for listeners, you have to rely on word of mouth or pop up on other productions hoping to grab some of their fans. But, if you piggyback your audio release on video channels, you can reach new audiences through the automated feeds of YouTube, TikTok, and X. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, apparently hoped to benefit accordingly when he débuted a video podcast, “This Is Gavin Newsom,” in March, that seemed intended to plant him in the public psyche as a 2028 Presidential contender. (By the next election, perhaps YouTube-channel-subscriber numbers will be as meaningful as a candidate’s performance in the polls.) The same month, Amy Poehler, an actor, writer, and comedy power-producer who ostensibly has little need for a new platform, launched her own video podcast, “Good Hang,” fostering a direct audience outside the usual Hollywood channels. There’s a certain levelling effect at play: no matter how big your name is, the ideal media strategy today seems to be a stage set and a microphone. In August, Taylor Swift used “New Heights,” the video podcast co-hosted by her now fiancé Travis Kelce, to divulge details of her latest album. Watching fans pore over the footage for clues in the couple’s body language, one couldn’t help but think that audio doesn’t stand a chance.

The video podcast has established a new aesthetic of information—or perhaps just revived one that was more familiar in the era of “Crossfire” debates on CNN. We watch for signs of emotional gravitas as much as for the content of what is being said. Authority adheres to hosts through their acts of sheer duration, with some broadcasting several times a week or for hours every day. Through video, we get to know our pundits the same way we engage with influencers, and the more we are convinced by their multimedia performances the more readily we join their podcasting personality cults. Increasingly, this world of digital broadcasting is embroiled in slow-burning rivalries and rhetorical fights, a Marvel universe of independent opinion-givers. In September, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared on Ezra Klein’s hit Times podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show,” which transitioned to video late last year. Coates was there to discuss a column that Klein had written about the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, in which Klein argued that Kirk had practiced politics “the right way.” Coates had published a rejoinder in Vanity Fair, pointing out that Kirk had “reveled in open bigotry.” Their tête-à-tête on Klein’s show, staged at a bare-bones studio table, added a human component to their battle of ideas. Coates looked visibly taken aback as he discussed Klein’s choice not to call out Kirk’s hateful ideology, and supportive viewers turned his skeptical face into a kind of reaction meme. Klein’s more placid affect, meanwhile, did little to absolve him of critiques of political abstraction and whitewashing. In the video-podcast era, those best able to project their authenticity through the small screen win—and it’s not always the people who film themselves the most often.

As the internet’s content-distribution channels become overwhelmingly cluttered with spam, misinformation, and A.I.-generated slop and propaganda, video podcasts have the considerable advantage of serving as markers of reality, at least for now. Viewers are reassured to see a voice coming directly out of a face, and a conversation documented for a stretch of time that would seem difficult to fake. ChatGPT can blandly spit out infinite facts, but individual eloquence is still in limited supply. What’s unclear is whether the video-podcast format can sustain the explosion of entrants as more talking heads in journalism, politics, entertainment, and tech jockey for attention in a digital landscape already beset by chronic distraction. In the past few months alone, we’ve seen the arrival of new video podcasts from Emily Sundberg’s buzzy New York City newsletter “Feed Me”; the sports agent Rich Paul and the ESPN commentator Max Kellerman, under the umbrella of The Ringer; the comedian Ilana Glazer; and PBS. (The New Yorker is not immune from the trend: it now films some episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour.) Least expected, perhaps, was the launch of “The Liz Truss Show,” hosted by the former British Prime Minister, on YouTube. Truss’s time in office lasted all of six weeks, but, with a clip-on microphone and a wonkish backdrop, perhaps she can gin up a new kind of following, one videotaped chat at a time. ♦

What’s in a like? That which we call a heart by any other name would be a retweet. (I am so sorry, mostly to my college Shakespeare professor, but really to everyone reading this.) On Instagram, in any event, the things we like perchance tell us more about ourselves than we might readily admit. For instance, I recently liked a video posted by Tao Elder Tianhe—no idea—in which he explains the “Human Feng Shui Formatio”: women who love lying down are not lazy but, rather, are “recharging, attracting luck, and keeping the whole family’s energy balanced.” He does not speak about whether watching a steady stream of “Southern Charm” while lying down has any effect on household vibes, but that’s O.K.: I’ve already moved on to liking multiple posts about decorating your Christmas tree with shrimp.

2025 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

What I’ve gleaned about you all—New Yorker readers—by reviewing the cartoons that you liked most on Instagram this year is that you’re really going through something. You reacted strongly to satire about health care, ICE raids, the Epstein files, and death rays. Which, fair. You also enjoyed cartoons that take place in therapists’ offices, which gives me hope that you’re working through some of this politically induced malaise (hopefully for only a small co-pay). And, sometimes, perhaps while reclining and recharging, you gave in to the simple pleasure of jokes about hot dogs, real dogs, varieties of tea, and Easter candy. For the sake of your own sanity, as well as the nation’s energy, which is certainly out of whack, please: stay horizontal, and keep scrolling.

In the beginning of Ha Jin’s new novel, “Looking for Tank Man,” a sophomore at Harvard seems to be on the verge of throwing her life away. Pei Lulu is the pride of her divorced parents. Her life in Boston is supported by her mother’s salary from a job at Tsinghua University and her father’s business of sculpting Buddhas and dragons for overseas clients. That Lulu has managed to study abroad—at Harvard, no less—is already an achievement. But she’s also particularly dedicated, even among her extraordinary peers. When her wealthy friend Rachel vacations in Newport or goes skiing in Vermont, Lulu is content to stay on campus, reading books in the library. There’s just one problem: she is a history major. All governments have their preferred versions of the past, but some are more totalizing than others. For a young Chinese person, interest in the wrong subject can seriously screw things up.

The year is 2008. Many Chinese people, including those pursuing an education abroad, still carry the self-image of an earnest underdog with much to learn and much to prove. (Lulu couldn’t have conceived that a Presidential decree might one day threaten her spot at Harvard, or question her eligibility for a student visa.) But has there ever been a simple time to be Chinese? A pivotal moment for Lulu arrives when she decides to join a crowd welcoming the visiting Chinese Premier. She feels an obligation to do so “because the delegates, even though we disliked them as officials, were from our motherland.” The mood is jubilant, with hundreds of miniature red flags and smiling young faces, except for one slender middle-aged woman. She is unaccompanied, but she holds a sign suggesting that she isn’t alone: “We Won’t Forget the Tiananmen Square Massacre!” The crowd is repulsed by her presence. A group of students disavow her message (“Nobody believes you!”), question her motive (“Why help Americans demonize our country like this?”), and call her names (“Bitch!” “Cunt!” “Loser!”). Lulu doesn’t participate and worries for the woman’s safety. Still, she uses the first-person plural in describing the crowd’s reaction. We intervene, she narrates, in the same way that we feel obligated to welcome the delegates from the motherland. The little flags, at first a sign of confidence in national identity, now seem to have turned into something else.

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I caught myself flinching at this scene, not only for the naked, charged confrontation, but also for Ha Jin’s choice to present it as a focal point. Jin left China in 1985 for a graduate program at Brandeis University. The brutal crackdown against student protesters in Tiananmen Square came four years later. In the aftermath, Jin’s decision to publicly support the students’ democratic values apparently cost him the ability to visit his home country. It’s impossible not to see him in the figure of the lonesome protester; he’s likely faced some of the same insults, the same accusations that he’s dredging up the past. “The massacre, if there’d been one,” Lulu thinks to herself, “had taken place almost two decades before, and I was amazed that the woman was still bent on making a protest about it today.” For the author to choose this history as a subject is to insist on examining a long-festering wound of his generation.

Before “Looking for Tank Man,” Jin had published twenty titles in America. Some were poetry, some were essays, but most were works of fiction that dealt with well-educated Chinese who were unhappy with their lives. At first, these characters were situated in the China that Jin had grown up in. Then, starting with Nan Wu in “A Free Life” (2007), they began to migrate to the United States. Nan—like Jin, a graduate student in America who’s shocked by the news from Tiananmen—was followed by a series of characters, in the story collection “A Good Fall” (2009), who are caught between two worlds, navigating hope and disillusionment. And the protagonists in “The Boat Rocker” (2016) and “A Song Everlasting” (2021) are thriving professionals—an expat journalist known for exposés of the Chinese government, a popular opera singer—whose failures to obey the state obstruct their path to an undisturbed, conventionally successful life.

The drama of these stories, in which insiders become outsiders, is evident; displacement promises profound confusion, conflict, discovery, and entanglement. So it goes with Lulu, who, after her encounter with the protester, becomes obsessed with the Tiananmen Square massacre, and enrolls in a course on the subject. It isn’t an easy class. Seeing photos and documents of crushed people, and visiting blood-drenched objects retrieved from the site and preserved in the basement of a Harvard library, Lulu is no longer in doubt of the facts. She turns her investigation toward the students’ intentions. She finds that they were peaceful and law-abiding, advocating for dialogue instead of subverting the political system. (After a portrait of Mao Zedong was vandalized, some even turned in the culprits to the authorities.) Lulu is especially drawn to the famous photograph of the “Tank Man,” who is seen from behind as he impedes a column of armored cars from advancing. Something about this image thrusts her feelings into contradiction. To her staunch nationalist friends, she fiercely defends its place as a global symbol of resistance; at the same time, she can’t stomach a mullet-sporting white guy who displays the photo prominently on his cabinet, as if it’s a poster of a rock star.

A decisive turn arrives when Lulu travels back to China to visit her ailing grandfather, who tells her a secret that’s been withheld for decades: her parents were involved in the protests during the spring of 1989. Her father had worked on the famous “Goddess of Democracy” statue, and her mother was among the first hunger strikers. Once Lulu starts asking questions, her parents don’t put up much of a fight. They still believe in the ideals of freedom and democracy, they say, but they’ve grown deeply skeptical of the reform they once demanded, and of their own sense of agency at the time. Her father feels he was maddened by rage. Her mother feels that she and her peers were “meant to be sacrificed.” Upon learning that Lulu is writing a thesis on what happened, though, she hands over her diary. “I hope it will be useful for your studies,” she says. Lulu’s father’s face twitches, but he encourages her: “You’ve got to do what you have to do. To be controlled by fear is not a way to live.”

As graduation approaches, Lulu ponders her future. On the one hand, she sees the appeal of finding a job in Beijing to be close to her mother, who raised her alone. On the other, she feels she has unfinished business in America, where, ironically, she’s best able to understand the particular history of her home. She is surrounded by adults who counsel her to be pragmatic, but there is little consensus on what that entails. Her dad feels obligated to make money for his new family—an Audi-driving young wife and twin boys preparing to eventually study in America—but wishes he had more integrity as an artist. Lulu’s mom regrets not pursuing a graduate education. She gives her daughter mixed instructions: Lulu ought to secure a good man as soon as possible, but should also stay self-sufficient, never beholden to money, power, or love.

Lulu navigates all this with a delicate maturity, managing her parents’ anxiety without necessarily surrendering to it. She moves to New York for a Ph.D. program at Columbia, which appears to be a haven of multicultural acceptance and intellectual inquiry. Her adviser is a charming cultural historian who used to perform standup in Mandarin; Lulu, whose dissertation is on Tiananmen, takes full advantage of the dedicated East Asian library. This environment stands in stark contrast to her experience at Tsinghua University, where she uses her mother’s I.D. to explore the library catalogue, which hosts a rich collection of translated Western classics but has scant publications on her specialty. When she awkwardly initiates conversations about the “Tank Man,” she ends up with a member of the campus police. The officer turns out to be an acquaintance of her mother’s, so he lets her go, but the message is clear: if she isn’t careful, a precious child of the motherland can easily become an enemy of the state.

I found Lulu’s bold expedition in Beijing incredible. What kind of sensible person would do this? Sometimes, the novel’s need to cause tension feels at odds with the nature of government-enforced silence, but a novel can’t represent everything; Jin wants to investigate, to connect. Lulu herself is an amusing, if strange, hybrid of an old Chinese soul and an American millennial. She pledges her commitment to her mother by saying, “If I need to carry you around on my back, I’ll do that.” The same Lulu turns around and adoringly calls her close friend a slut. When she figures out that she was conceived in the immediate aftermath of the bloody crackdown, she exclaims, “I am a fucking Tiananmen baby!”

In a way, all the Chinese students who have roamed U.S. campuses in the past two decades are children of Tiananmen. They saw China’s rise as a modern superpower, but they also grew up in the shadow of 1989’s unspeakable fear and internalized guilt. When I visit Beijing from time to time, I occasionally pass by Chang’an Avenue, which runs between the stately Tiananmen gate and the square that bears its name. The street is lined by tall, graceful lamps comically laden with surveillance cameras. I’m always swept away by the site’s crosscurrents of meaning: there’s the sheer and grandiose beauty of the architecture, which has witnessed the fall of dynasties and the attempt, by the People’s Republic, to build an egalitarian country, and there’s the inescapable fact that this place is a symbol of authoritarian control.

To embrace the former makes one a righteous heir; to recognize the latter risks one being disowned. Lulu chooses to hold both possibilities close: she doesn’t accept looking away from atrocities, but she doesn’t throw her life away, either. Her own idea of pragmatism is to live an “independent and fulfilled life.” It would be wrong to forget such history, but it would be wrong, too, to imagine that it could be contained in a thesis, or even in one’s memory. After all, in cautiously phrased news stories, in disappeared citizens, in halting phrases and unfinished conversations, the spectre of Tiananmen lives on. ♦